Experts outline e-voting security requirements
A major effort is needed to ensure election transparency, but time is short

  Story by Dan Verton

JUNE 30, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - A panel of IT security experts yesterday proposed a series of detailed recommendations that they said state and local jurisdictions must act on immediately to ensure the security of electronic voting systems and the accuracy and transparency of the November presidential election.

In a report released by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, four high-profile IT security experts, including Howard Schmidt, a former White House cybersecurity adviser, outlined a comprehensive strategy for certifying the security and reliability of touch-screen direct recording electronic (DRE) voting systems. Those systems will be used by 30% of registered voters in the upcoming presidential election.

While analysts in the security and elections communities praised the report, most agreed that it may have come too late for states and local jurisdictions to act upon.

Chief among the panel's eight recommendations is a call for elections officials to hire a well-qualified, independent security team to examine the potential for operational failures and malicious attacks against DRE voting systems. According to the report, such an expert security team "must be free of any business relationships with any voting system vendors or designers" and must be granted unfettered access to all software code and configuration data.

The panel also recommended that all jurisdictions contract for independent "red team" exercises to uncover any hidden physical and electronic vulnerabilities in DRE systems. And it urged election officials to make public information about the level of cooperation received from DRE system vendors.

Site-specific security procedures and physical security also weighed heavily in the panel report. For example, the experts urged jurisdictions to use "tamper tape" on all vulnerable hardware devices and to document strict procedures for repair of systems. An investigation after the 2000 election, for example, found that all 32,000 of Maryland's touch-screen terminals had the same locks and keys, making every machine accessible to anyone with one of the keys. The keys could also be easily reproduced at three local hardware stores.

In addition, systems that malfunctioned in Fairfax County, Va., were removed for repair and returned to service during election day raising the possibility that votes could have been altered with no process in place to spot any problems.

Other recommendations in the report include the creation of security training programs for all elections officials and poll workers, development of procedures for random testing and auditing of systems and standardization of the procedures for handling incidents.

Jim Adler, founder and CEO of VoteHere Inc., a Bellevue, Wash.-based developer of electronic voting security technologies, said the recommendations are an accurate reflection of what must be done. But many of the systems and procedures for the November election are either already in place or now being deployed.

"It's late," said Adler, who was interviewed by the panel for the report. "Where was this a year ago?"

Jeremy Epstein, senior director for product security at Fairfax, Va.-based WebMethods Inc., characterized the panel's report as a set of short-term recommendations that are "exactly on the mark."

Epstein said he believes the recommendations can be implemented in time for the November elections, but "over the longer term," he added, "the need is clearly there for voter-verified paper audit trails, or perhaps some form of cryptographically protected voting." Epstein is one of thousands of private-sector executives who have signed an online petition at www.verifiedvoting.org that calls for vendors to provide voter-verified paper audit trails for their systems.

Adler is also critical of the support given thus far to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). Although the commission was established by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, it didn't receive official office space until April. Likewise, the commission received only $1.2 million of the $10 million it was promised.

Meanwhile, the EAC announced on June 17 that it has formed a 15-member Technical Guidelines Development Committee that will offer assistance to state and local jurisdictions that plan to spend the $2.3 billion in federal funds made available to purchase new voting equipment in 2005.